YELLOW JA.SiriXE. llo 



crimson in the " merry month of May." It is not a 

 violent transition to pass from this gay thing to the 

 grander and more glorious Pynis japoiuca — which it is 

 the fashion now to class as a Cydonia — a tree that is worth 

 having for its bright leafage, but is almost terrific in its 

 splendour of crimson flowers when spring bursts upon us 

 suddenly, and they all come out at once. But this good 

 friend is everywhere so badly grown, being systematically 

 crippled with the pruning-knife, that not many people 

 know it in proper character. There is, however, one per- 

 fect specimen, in the garden of the Royal Horticultural 

 Society at Chiswick. It is a mountain of green, lighted 

 with a thousand crimson flames in the month of /■'^.ni; 

 and one reason of its exceeding massiveness and splendour 

 is that it is never pruned at all. 



Mention of the laburnum should remind us that it 

 belongs to the great family of ]iapilionaceous plants, for in 

 that family we find two magnificent garden trees, the rose 

 acacia {Hobinia hispida) and the Judas tree {Ccrcin nih- 

 qiiastrinii). The first produces a profuse leafage, and large 

 ^•acemes of handsome purplish-rosy flowers. The second 

 Aas iieculiar roundish leaves, and in early summer it is 

 quite richly dotted with small flowers of an intensely rich 

 crimson or carmine-tinted rose colour. These flowers 

 appear on the young wood and the old wood alike ; and 

 sometimes we see them on the rough stem of the tree, as 

 though fixed there by some eccentric genius to deceive us. 

 But it is Nature's doing ; the eccentricities of man are as 

 nothinff to her infinite resources when in a whimsical 



o 



humour. 



Of syringas and spirseas we have discoursed ; but the 

 flowering shrubs and trees are so many that one does not 



